mike jablonski

A few weeks ago my Samsung 46″ LCD TV starting acting up. It’s just over two years old (Model Number LN-T4665F), but that’s long enough to be out of the warranty period. Every once in a while purple dots would cover the picture, but if you turned the TV off and then back on, the dots would go away.

Right around the same time the TV had another issue where it would power on a couple times before the picture would actually appear on the screen. The Samsung plays a start up sound when you first press power on your remote. Normally the picture appears shortly after the start up sound, but my TV would play the sound two or three times before the picture would appear.

A Google search turned up a number of people with the same symptoms. AVS Forum has a huge thread on this series of Samsung LCD’s, and includes a bunch of advice on how to fix the problem. Long story short, you need to replace some bad capacitors on the power supply board.

Step one is opening up the TV. There are a bunch of screws to remove on the back, don’t forget the big wall mount bolts. Here’s a picture with the back cover removed.

And here is a close up of the bad capacitors.

I replaced three of these (total cost was < $6 at Fry’s). The bad ones are the medium sized black capacitors with a bulge on top. I put everything back together and the TV is working great!

I’ve updated the audiostream-meta project hosted on Google Code to include all the updates I’ve made to the original AudioStreamer example from Matt Gallagher. In addition to parsing audio stream metadata the latest code will play AAC and AAC+ V1 (thanks to Brian Stormont) streams. The stream bitrate is also detected and displayed, along with the metadata, on the sample view.

The next version of Stream.ly Radio has been submitted to Apple for review. I’m excited about this release. I feel like this next version really cleans up the interface and adds some great features. You’ll now be able to search the radio directory and Live365 members can enter their username & password in the Settings app so they can play even more Live365 stations. The Live365 login feature came about from a four year old [!] blog post by a guy named Jim Russell. Thanks Jim!

I’ve removed the Twitter/Song.ly integration from this new release. That feature has always felt half-baked to me anyway. It’s easy to get excited about integrating everything (Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.) into an iPhone app, but Stream.ly is about streaming radio, so that’s where I want to focus future development.

I fixed a bug on my iPhone viewmymessage.com copy paste hack web page. Some messages wouldn’t work, should be fixed now. Here’s the original post about the page and here is a direct link to the page itself.

Live365.com doesn’t make it easy for casual users to figure out how to play a radio station with anything but the Live365 website. There is a URL you can use to directly access the MP3 stream, it’s just hard to find. If you want to play a stream in iTunes, Winamp, or on your iPhone, XBOX Media Center, or any other compatible device you’ll need the direct stream URL.

The following link is a bookmarklet that you can use to get the stream URL for any Professional Live365 station. Make sure the station says “professional”, or the stream won’t work.

In Firefox and Safari you can left click (keep the button down) and drag this link to your bookmark toolbar. In Internet Explorer you can right click and add the link to your favorites.

Live 365 Stream URL

Now when you visit a Live365 professional station page, like Houndstooth, you can click the saved bookmarklet and it will give you the stream URL.

Since the iPhone only allows one program to be running at a time users of streaming radio applications can’t read their email or look at Twitter while listening to music. The new iPhone OS 3.0 has added a feature that helps make this possible, although it’s not perfect.

If you open a compatible streaming radio link in Safari on the iPhone it will open a QuickTime player that will play the stream. Since Safari is allowed to run in the background, you can press the home button and start up other applications while the stream is still playing in Safari. The downside is that you can’t do anything else in Safari while the stream is playing.

Try it. Click on the Indie 103.1 playlist URL or the Houndstooth Radio stream URL from your iPhone.

I’ll add a feature to Stream.ly in the next update to do this automatically from the application. I’ll also update the Stream.ly website so you can browse the station directory from Safari on the phone and listen to a station without needing the application itself. The application adds a lot of nice features though.

UPDATE: It’s still in a “beta” stage, but you can now browse around the Stream.ly Radio web directory and play stations in Safari from this URL. iPhone only for now.

Anyone who has an iPhone has probably received a text message that looks like this:

I sent you a multimedia

message. You can view my

message w/in the next 7 days

via the web at

www.viewmymessage.com/1

using MSG ID l3l4kd93ej

Password lame4att

Until AT&T unlocks the new MMS support in OS 3.0 us iPhone users have to enter a message id and password on http://www.viewmymessage.com to view MMS messages. Since the new OS allows copy and paste I made a web page to simplify the process. You can copy the entire text message and paste it into the textbox right from your iPhone. Touch the Send button and the message id and password are pulled out and sent to the viewmymessage.com site.

None of your text messages or MMS pictures are saved or logged by this page.

I even made a quick icon for it, so you can save a nice Safari home screen bookmark.

Try it out!

I checked in a small but important bug fix to the audiostreamer-meta iPhone streaming audio project. There was a case where the SHOUTcast interval byte would show up on it’s own (buffer length == 1) and that byte was incorrectly getting sent to the audio queue which would cause a sound skip. It’s fixed now so if you are using the project look at the diff or grab the new code.

Here are some free download codes for Stream.ly, my new iPhone streaming radio app. Check out the Stream.ly website for some stream URLs to get started. The codes are only good for one use so first come first serve.

MWHXKN6Y3W9L
XFPT4LPTJWWE
ERL74NXJL9RW
WKMF7TYLLKPR
NY3R6PE7WHTL
64TWKLAN9HFA
R4NNWK3A3PE6
LAL7MJPTAT76
J6EFKX7ANKYK
EN3PWFP3X3F9

You can copy-paste one of these code into iTunes. Click on the Redeem link in the iTunes Store Quick Links box.

Enjoy!

A few people have looked at the source of my Indie 103.1 iPhone App and asked about reading SHOUTcast metadata (artist and track information) from the audio stream. The Indie App code won’t read metadata for SHOUTcast streams – but it does work for Icecast streams. Turns out that SHOUTcast and Icecast (two of the most popular server applications for streaming radio) are supposed to be compatible, but the response message from each server is slightly different.

SmackFu has a great page that documents the ShoutCAST metatdata protocol. They don’t mention the difference in the server response, but you’ll find references to it on Google.

When  you send an HTTP GET request to an Icecast server (like Indie 103.1) it replies with HTTP 200 OK. This is what we’d expect, and you can use CFHTTPMessageCopyHeaderFieldValue to read the response header where you get the Icy-MetaInt value. SHOUTcast responds to an HTTP GET request with ICY 200 OK. When this happens CFHTTPMessageCopyHeaderFieldValue returns null.

One solution is to look for the ICY 200 OK response and parse the headers manually. I’ve created another Google Code project called audiostreamer-meta and used Matt Gallagher’s execelent AudioStreamer example as a sample project. The sample application will parse the metadata from both server streams. Check the debug window in Xcode to see the metadata. The code needs some clean up, and it would be nice to display the artist, tract, and other metadata on the view itself. Feel free to join the project and help make the code better.